


Pianoforte

by takethembystorm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluffy Ending, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 20:42:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6625489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Homesickness is a bitch.  Adrien and Marinette find their ways to cope with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pianoforte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clairelutra (exosolarmoon)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exosolarmoon/gifts).



> Inspired by [this](http://actualmodel.tumblr.com/post/126244502008) tumblr post.

It’s a hot night, and Marinette’s sweat-transparent shirt sticks to her as she unbuttons it and peels it off, leaving her in shorts and a cream-pale sleeveless top.

“Yeah, Mom,” she sighs into her phone as she opens her fridge and pours herself a glass of lemonade.  “Yes, Mom, yes—I’m settling in well at work, Mom, it’s going great.  Yes, I’m eating enough, Mom.”  Marinette pauses for a moment as she steps out onto the balcony and closes the door behind her.  “No, Mom, I haven’t gotten a boyfriend yet.  No, Mom—Mom!”

Marinette listens for a few seconds more.  “Okay, Mom.  Tell Dad I love him.  Love you too, Mom.  Love you, Mom.  Bye.”

Marinette slips her phone into a pocket and collapses onto her deck chair.  Without looking, she reaches down and beneath it and pulls a fan free, which she opens with a flick of her wrist.  She stares blankly before her as she fans herself.

So she’s free tomorrow.  Free for the first time since she’s moved here.  Moved here from home, which feels half a world away and farther every day.

She’d been lying to her mother just now, she admits.  She’s not doing fine.  She misses the smell of her mother’s cooking, she misses the wide-open spaces, she misses her neighborhood, her bed, the sound of the bakery in the morning, her old friends, her mother’s garden, which would’ve been full of slow-growing melons and sprouting leafy bundles and the smell of ripening fruit baking under the sun.  The flowers she’d picked up from the local nursey, still little more than leaves and stems with odd-looking bulbs on the end, are a poor substitute.

They help a little, at least.

She folds the fan with a snap and sets it aside as she takes a gulp of lemonade, then sets her cup down next to the fan, hearing the grind of near-microscopic gravel against the glass.  She’s got to get a table or something, just something large enough to place things on.

She gets up and walks over to the row of sad little green shoots hanging in planters from her balcony railing, picking a pink spray bottle from where she’d left it the week before.  She spritzes them without much enthusiasm.

She’s starting to wonder whether this job was worth it.

Someone below her starts playing a piano.  Idly, she listens.

At first it’s merely scales, the notes coming so swiftly that it almost sounds like an arpeggio.  Then, after a minute or two of this, there’s a pause that draws in the ear.

Then the pianist starts playing for real.  He must be using a keyboard, because the tones that float up from below are no longer those of a piano but are instead the humming thrum of strings.

It’s Adagio for Strings, but like she’s never heard it before.  The music itself is meant to be sob-inducing, but whoever this is lets his hands stroke lightly over the chords, divesting the tones of all the melodrama she’s always heard it played with.  It instead acquires a drifting, ethereal quality that curls around her like a mewling cat: a warm presence, comforting by its nature.  Things are bad, the music seems to say, but you can endure.  They will get better.

The music ends.  Marinette feels something drip onto her hand and realizes a beat later that she’s crying.

* * *

After two weeks of what is absolutely not stalking, Marinette figures out that the pianist lives in the apartment below hers.

Now she just needs to figure out how to approach him.

Just leaning over her balcony and shouting “Hey!  I like your music!” is probably not the best approach.

Showing up at his door and knocking and telling him when he answers the door “Hey!  I like your music!” is probably a little creepier than is strictly necessary.

She settles for a note.  She grabs some decent stationary and a pen, and after a minute’s thought, scribbles down a quick note.

“Your music is beautiful,” she writes in her looping script, “and it makes me feel things.”  She hesitates and crosses out the second part.  “And it makes me feel home”—she crosses out the last word—“like I’m at home again.  Thank you.”

She reviews the message, grabs a fresh sheet, and rewrites it carefully.  On mad impulse, she adds, “If it isn’t too much trouble, could you please play Rachmaninoff's Prelude Opus 3 No. 2 the night after tomorrow?  It’s always been a favorite of mine.”

She folds the note carefully and slips it into her purse.  The next morning, as she’s heading out to work, she slips the note beneath his door.

That evening, when she comes up, she notices a note taped to his door at eye-height.  She glances around, then takes the note and reads it.

“Thank you for your kind words,” the note reads, “and Rachmaninoff is a favorite of mine, too.  I shall endeavor not to disappoint you.”

And so it goes for weeks more.  The stilted formality of their first notes fades with familiarity and descends into good-natured teasing.

“I will bet you twenty dollars and a dozen cupcakes that you can’t play the Bumblebee,” she writes to him.

“You’re on,” he responds.  He wins that bet, and Marinette spends an hour spelling out something rude on his cupcakes in buttercream frosting.

“Please never stop playing,” she writes to him after one of his neighbors starts making nasty comments.  “It’s good for my plants.”

“I’ll need to see some proof of that,” he writes back.

The next morning she snips a few roses from her planter and places them in front of his door in lieu of a note.  When she comes back from work, there’s a small, folded envelope taped to the door next to his answering note.

“Some ladybugs for my Lady,” the note reads.  “Caught them in the park today.  Hopefully they’ll help with your aphid problem.”

She holds the envelope up to the light and squints; several little dark circles scurry around inside.

Okay, that explains the ladybugs.  But the aphid problem?  She doesn’t have an aphid problem.

When she goes out to water her plants with the strains of what sounds like Bach serenading her, she takes a second look at her roses and finds the underside of the flowers swarming with little green insects.  She sighs, goes inside to grab the envelope, and shakes its contents out over the planter.

The pianist gets a dozen of the cookies she bakes that weekend.

* * *

Marinette hums jauntily to herself in B major as she strolls down the hallway, note in hand.

She’s got the perfect retaliatory strike in mind.  The pianist has started signing his notes with little adorable inky pawprints in what is probably a flirty attempt to be cute.  Well, she’d dug out her old watercolors, tried them, didn’t like them, went out and got better watercolors, practiced a few dozen times, and had finally gotten a little watercolor ladybug that she liked.  She’d then copied it onto a bit of stationary, then another when she hadn’t been satisfied with it, and then a third when she’d screwed up the note.

Things happen quickly as she kneels to slip the note under the door.  First, someone pushes it open with his back, a laundry basket on his hip, his attention fully focused on someone still in the room called “Plagg”.  Second, his foot comes down on the note as Marinette jerks backwards.  Third, he slips on the piece of paper, and goes over backwards, right onto Marinette.

Marinette tries to catch him but gets squashed flat by his weight as an elbow jabs into her ribs.

The man recovers first.

“Oh, _fuck_ me I’m sorry,” he says, kicking aside his laundry basket as he gets up.  “Are you all right—damn it, Plagg, put that down.”

A tiny green-eyed black kitten trots up with the note in its mouth.  It mewls at her.

“I am so, so sorry,” the man says as Marinette rolls up to a sitting position.  “Here, let me help you up.”

Marinette takes the proffered hand and looks up.

She freezes.

She hadn’t been expecting _this._

The pianist is, as she suspects, male, but _devastatingly_ so.  He’s tall, toned, broad-shouldered, and leanly muscled, with just a hint of tan, green eyes that are almost luminous with their intensity.  A mess of goldenrod hair falls over his eyes, half-obscuring them, but does little to stop his gaze from burning into her.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

She falls back on the response that seems appropriate to the situation.  “Hey!” she says with the manic cheerfulness of the panicked.  “I like your music!”

* * *

“Yeah, Mom,” she says as she locks her door and brushes a few bits of lint from her dress.  “Yes, Mom, yes—I’m settling in well at work, Mom, it’s going great.  Yes, I’m eating enough, Mom.”  Marinette pauses for a moment as she readjusts her hair.  “No, Mom, I haven’t gotten a boyfriend yet.  No, Mom—Mom!”

Marinette listens for a few seconds more.  “Okay, Mom.  Tell Dad I love him.  Love you too, Mom.  Love you, Mom.  Bye.”

“No boyfriend yet, hm?” Adrien says with a smirk.  “So you wouldn’t happen to have this evening free?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Marinette drawls, looping her arm through his.  “This really cute guy asked me out and I was hoping to have a nice evening out with him.”

“He here?”

“Sadly, no,” Marinette says, pouting at him.  “I guess you’ll have to do.”

“You _wound_ me, Princess,” Adrien says.

“Stabby stabby.”  She reaches up on tiptoe and kisses him on a cheek.  “So where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Hm.”  Marinette taps a finger on her lips.  “How about this, then.  I like your surprise, then you’ll be my boyfriend.  Acceptable?”

She likes it.


End file.
